“Why not market to everyone? We want the most number of customers possible.” Frankly, this is a valid point. All businesses want to maximize the number of potential sales they can make. However, in order to maximize the number of potential sales, it is critical that businesses don’t market to everyone.

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When we market to everyone, we create generic content with the hopes that it will have the widest appeal. We also create content with the least chance of having any value to any one group of people. It’s a bland diet of white bread and skim milk. In the 1950s, it may have been possible to say that anyone in a particular geographic area would constitute a target market, because there were fewer purchasing options available to consumers. Now, though, there are an infinite number of purchasing options for consumers, whether in the form of local brick-and-mortar shops or online retailers.

“Adopting a general approach – assuming your customers will come essentially equally from all segments or demographics – is no longer enough to support a new business, because the marketplace has become too differentiated. In courting potential customers, owners must consider age, gender, lifestyle and technological sophistication….”

While marketing to everybody is as useful as marketing to nobody, identifying a target market or markets to market to based on what makes these markets unique, what speaks to them, and what reflects their experiences and values, allows a business to focus their marketing on what works with those target customers. Identifying a target market can also help a business that knows it has a viable product but does not know how to differentiate itself from its competitors.